#27

http://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/dream-song-27-%255Cthe-greens-of-the-ganges-delta-foliate%255C-john-berryman-poems/

 “Brownies”? “Little people”? Sounds like a touch of that racial superiority, that settles so easily onto a colonialist mindset. Filipinos were our “little brown brothers” as we drove out their Spanish colonizers so that we Americans could colonize them better instead. Here, the “Brownies” are Indians, and this poem refers again to B.’s experiences in India, a reflection as the narrator is flying away. Aside from that, it’s a pretty interesting poem, beginning Section II of The Dream Songs, and beginning with a plea to the people he’s encountered, uneducated and condescendingly brown and innocent, “made late aware” of the complications that an education brings, to not let the arrogant power he represents close their ears to the songs of the green wood they spring from—like, one imagines, so many prelapsarian naifs splashing exuberantly naked and joyously savage through their great river deltas and uncharted forests. The voice embodies a fairly standard, sort of exhausted colonialist arrogance, but I think it’s also so self-aware and self-critical, and sad, that the narrator is trying to undermine that arrogance with an implied lament at his own and his culture’s discontent, from which he can’t escape and to which he must return; and his sadness as well comes from his students’ irreversible entry into the world of Western sophistication and its attendant malaise. Whether this works or not is probably open to question, but I’m going to give the poet credit for an attempt at wrestling with his bigotry.

Since thoughts of spring have been summoned—on this frigid January day, with a big nor’easter snowstorm in New England dominating the news—I think it’s time for a sonnet:

The blithe spring air softens like kissed lips,

And don’t we all attend that season’s gift
Of growth and warmth, when April’s showers lift
Bedraggled faces to a dancing sky that slips
In soft cascades, and all those pink and bright
Flowers jump like puppies in our laps
And birdies singy-sing, and mushroom caps
Like pink umbrellas shelter fucking elves?
Oh. It seems I lost composure. I’m tired.
Oh, I yearn like everybody else
For springtime’s lilting step and always try
To hope the new green rave leaves me inspired.
But winter melts, as all the planet melts,
While good Spring returns with a dance and a sigh.

KZ